Question

Identify the key activities that characterize most people's lives. Next, clearly examine your own situation and explain the approach(es) that you should use in balancng these activities in order to develop resiliency. Support your position.

Identify and explain the key steps of the analytical problem-solving model. Then, provide a problem-solving example that follows each of the key steps.

Explain some difficulties that can occur with each of the steps in the rational problem-solving model.

Answer 1

RESILIENCE:

Resilience is the ability of an individual to bounce back in to normal life when he or she is confronted by any traumatic life situations.

In everyday life people face many difficulties that vary in intensity from less severe problems like daily stressful job, interpersonal problems with friends or family, or it could be more severe problems like having an accident or a loss of a loved one. Though people experience intense distress during the traumatic situations, they have the ability to get back to their normal life when they get sufficient support.

For example:

I have not completed my task that was given to me by my manager so he gets irritated and started to yell at me in front of my colleagues and warned me not to repeat it for the next time. Though this might sound easy, I feelt embarrassed for getting a black mark from my manager and also felt humiliated. I felt disturbed for the whole day, I could not focus on my work, and i did not even talk to my colleagues. Even after returning home, those incidents kept disturbing me. And then I shared my feelings with my brother, who then consoled me and also encouraged me not to repeat such things again and told me to take it as a lesson and learn from it. Later I felt relieved and then started to work on my assignments and submitted it to my manager the next day, and he felt happy about it and also apologized for being harsh with me the previous day.

So in the above scenario, I took the traumatic incident to be lesson and I tried to rectify it and worked on it to fix the problem, which finally gave me positive outcomes.

ANALYTICAL PROBLEM SOLVING MODEL:

Example: A student keeps scoring very low marks in his exams and often takes leave to school. His parents started complaining regarding this issue. When the student was called and asked about his problem, he opens up and tells that his teacher is being very rude with him, and often mocks at him because he was a average student and even his friends started teasing him due to which he felt embarassed and started avoiding going to school.

Step 1- Identify the problem:

It is clear from the example that the student's problem is with his teacher who mistreats him.

Step 2 - Explore alternatives:

In this case, either the parents could complain about the teacher to the Head Master, or they could even directly approach the teacher and talk to them regarding this issue, or the student could be sent for other special classes by avoiding that teacher.

Step 3 - Select an alternative:

The best alternative for this ase would be, the parents approaching the teacher and talking to him regarding their child's problem, rather than complaining against the teacher or sending the child to other classes.

Step 4 - Implement the solution:

Now, the parents might go and tell the teacher that their child is getting disturbed and feeling embarassed to come to school because of the his activities. They could say that a good teacher only encourages and motivates a average learning student rather than mocking at him. And they could also say that if he keeps doing the same, they might complain against him to the Head Master.

Step 5 - Evaluate the situation:

After this the parents should monitoring the teacher's activities, and their child's performance if everything goes well the problems is solved. If not, they might take further actions.

Difficulties in a Rational Problem Solving Model:

In the first step, the person may not be able to figure out what the actual problem is, and if there are many problems, he might get confused of which problem to be addressed first.

In the second step, while figuring out the alternatives, the person may come with various ideas which might or might not be appropriate to the situation or he might be unable to find alternate solutions.

In the third step, the person might not know which alternate idea is to be chosen and which would be most suitable to the problem.

In the fourth step, while implementing the solution, the person might find it difficult to actually put his plan in to action.

In the fifth step, the person will come to know whether his problem is actually solved or not, and whether this solution is permanent. If not solved, he might have to repeat the process from step 1 and figure out the best solution to the problem.